| Company | Value | Change | %Change |
|---|
Perplexity AI’s reception in India has been phenomenal, with the company recently increasing its users to over a million. This is a remarkable achievement for the startup, which first released its answer engine in December 2022. Demand continues to rise for its services, leaving Perplexity AI with plans to invade the ever-expanding Indian market.
Perplexity AI was founded in August 2022. The venture was founded by Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski, and later secured $500 million as the latest round of funding, tripling its valuation from $3 billion to $9 billion. Some of the giant investors included Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), and Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke.
Perplexity AI, backed by major investors such as Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), and Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke, is expanding rapidly with a focus on India.
“We want that number to expand to like 10-100X more because the Indian population is so big,” Srinivas said in an interview with Moneycontrol.
The company’s AI-powered answer engine, which is challenging tech giants like Google and Microsoft, currently has over 10 million active users worldwide.
Srinivas also highlighted the strong awareness of Generative AI in India, noting, “A lot of people are aware of ChatGPT and large language models…They are already using these technologies in creative ways.” He further stated, “So, I think we are going to see a lot more faster movement in the AI revolution in India compared to the previous web and mobile revolution, where we were a little behind the rest of the world.”
In an endorsement of Perplexity AI’s approach, Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of AI data cloud firm Snowflake, praised the startup’s innovation. He explained, “At Neeva, we spent three years creating a search engine from scratch, where we did the crawl, we did the indexing, we did a lot of heavy work. Perplexity came quite a bit later, and they simply relied on APIs and produced a great product. That really was what drove the positive momentum for the company.”
“All startups have limited shelf lives in terms of how much you can keep going. My team in the last year sort of was tired of the uncertainty of being a startup and the relentless number of fundraising rounds that you must do. Perplexity created a great product, and they’ve been very quick to innovate. I give Aravind (Aravind Srinivas, founder)—also an IIT-Madras graduate, a lot of credit. What they have done is truly remarkable,” Ramaswamy added.
